30.04.2026
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America’s centrist assassins
Why do young men keep trying to kill Donald Trump? Why do political ‘moderates’ turn to ‘extremist’ methods? Paul Demarty investigates a phenomenon with deep historical roots
As I write, little is known about Cole Tomas Allen, who attempted to shoot up the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington DC.
He has, at least, done us the favour of leaving what they are calling a ‘manifesto’, published by Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post. The scare quotes are necessary, since he says very little about his motives. “I am a citizen of the United States of America,” he writes. “What my representatives do reflects on me. And I am no longer willing to permit a paedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.”1 Much of the rest is taken up with apologies to people he may have put in danger, and abstract justifications of his methods. Social media history seems to reveal a down-the-line ‘resistance’ liberal - anti-Trump, anti-left and pro-Ukraine.
But then, also as I write, almost nothing is known about Thomas Crooks, who nicked Donald Trump’s ear at an election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in 2024. The latter seems to have little to no trail of social media posts; nor had he exhibited any signs of dangerous extremism to those who knew him. He seems to have been a registered Republican at one time, but what on earth that entails at this peculiar juncture in US political history is anyone’s guess.
Likewise Tyler Robinson, who shot dead Charlie Kirk at a Utah university campus last year: at least in his case it is clear that his motive was to stop Kirk spreading hate, but, apart from that, he seems to have been a more or less normal young American man, whose principal hobby was playing video games and talking about that on Discord. There is a profile here, but the profile is … nothing - a blank space, where we expect to find some grand pathological case history. Luigi Mangione, charged with gunning down healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in a New York street, had some background in the Silicon Valley ‘rationalist’ scene, a sort of ultra-nerdy radical-centrist ideology with an apocalyptic obsession with artificial intelligence.
Security
Perhaps more will emerge about Allen in the coming days and weeks. As of right now, beyond his little screed and Bluesky posts, we know only that he was a state-college-educated engineer and computer programmer, who made some money in private tutoring (for which, according to Reuters, he earned a ‘teacher of the year’ award in 2024). He lives far from Washington, in southern California.
He appears to have been a resident in the hotel, which maybe tells us how he got a weapon past security, but otherwise little: the ‘manifesto’ makes clear he checked in to begin his little spree, and he expresses astonishment at how easy it was for him to do that. “Like, if I was an Iranian agent, instead of an American citizen, I could have brought a damn Ma Deuce in here and no-one would have noticed shit. Actually insane.” (A ‘Ma Deuce’ is an M2 tripod-mounted machine gun.)
Indeed, the circumstances will naturally invite speculation. Could this have been a Reichstag fire-type provocation on the part of Trump and his cronies? That cannot be ruled out, of course, but Trump’s immediate reaction was not to demand gross restrictions on political freedom for his enemies, but instead to urge the speediest possible completion of his new White House ballroom, which apparently would make this impossible - the design is certainly security-conscious, underneath all the tacky columns and gold leaf. One thinks of the zombie comedy, Shaun of the Dead, where one character rebukes Shaun because his “idea of a romantic nightspot and an impenetrable fortress are the same thing”.
Historical parallels have been drawn between these assassinations and attempted assassinations, and the political violence in Italy, especially in the 1970s. Some have even snappily termed the present situation in the US “the years of lead paint”, in reference to the generally dismal state of environmental safety in America’s poorer cities.
Immediately, of course, big differences jump out - the anni di piombo in Italy were driven, essentially, by clandestine anti-communist activities loosely directed by the CIA, at a time where the entry into government of the Communist Party was a serious possibility. Through various intermediaries, including coup-plotting army officers, Masonic lodges, fascist cells and the Vatican - possibly the only truly X Files-level political conspiracy ever to have happened in real life - Italy was beset by bombings, kidnappings and political murders. Both the far-right and leftist urban guerrillas were implicated, though the level of state penetration on both sides renders things especially murky.
We plainly are not looking at a similar situation in the US, objectively speaking. There is no Communist Party worthy of the name, never mind one knocking on the door of government. There is no Soviet Union, nor is half the American continent under ‘socialist’ rule, as Europe was said to be by some. The stakes are lower. On the other hand, the Trump administration this time around is packed with far-right toadies who may well really believe that the United States is in immediate danger of a ‘communist takeover’ (since the Democrats are also ‘communists’, and the broader liberal left consists entirely of ‘cultural Marxists’ …). Perhaps they are foolish and insane enough to run a strategy of tension in their own back yard.
Comparisons
We will proceed, assuming that this is not the case; that nothing more interesting than incompetence allowed Allen access to the dinner, and no FBI agent entrapped him into attempting it (which may have been the case with a foiled plot to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer a few years ago). Political assassinations are by no means an exclusively American pursuit, but they seem far more common than in the average ‘western democracy’. Four presidents have been assassinated; Allen’s action is both possibly the third attempt on Trump’s life, and the second attempted presidential killing at the correspondents’ dinner in the Washington Hilton (John Hinckley Jr attempted to do away with Ronald Reagan there 45 years ago).
In the 1970s, one could look at the Italian Red Brigades or fascist cells, from a bourgeois mainstream point of view, and be quite unsurprised by the resort to terrorist violence. These people, after all, were way out at the fringes; they wanted to overthrow society - and did Lenin not say that “sometimes history needs a push”? (Actually, probably not, but who’s counting?) The same would go for the Weather Underground in the US, or its rightwing militia groups; as for Hinckley, he was simply insane.
Fun fiction
This recent crew, though? Why is someone whose holy text is a piece of philosophical fan-fiction called Harry Potter and the methods of rationality gunning down CEOs in Manhattan? Why is a nice Mormon boy sniping at rightwing celebrities from a nearby roof? Who the hell was Thomas Crooks, anyway? Looking at Allen’s manifesto, one cannot help but notice the slightly whimsical, jokey tone. This is not the Marxist-Leninist dogmatics or neo-fascist occultism of old, certainly.
In that respect, it is perhaps more useful to place them in the company of serial and spree-killers of the more usual, nihilistic type. Random acts of mass murder are now so common in the United States that they have almost lost the ability to shock. There is, moreover, a discernible historical cycle to them: serial killers in the 1960s and 70s faded away, to be replaced with workplace mass-shooters - the phenomenon of men ‘going postal’, from the perceived tendency especially of postal workers to take such drastic action.
With the Columbine high school massacre in 1999, such outrages became far more common in schools and college campuses - and, of course, the child victims garner especial shock and outrage. To that one can add attacks on crowded public spaces, as with the mass shooting in a Colorado cinema in 2012, and the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas - the deadliest ever, and one of the most inexplicable.
These cycles strongly suggest that the popular idea of copycat crimes has a reality to it. Spectacular acts of criminality like this, in an age of ever-advancing mass-media penetration into popular consciousness, become sensations. They dominate public discussion. The national soul-searching at the time of the Columbine massacre was enormous, and aggravated the culture war over the second amendment. Yet it also made Dylan Klebold and Ed Harris notorious. That notoriety precisely provides a template for future alienated, nihilist youth.
Rough justice
The template for political assassinations, of course, is everywhere. It is a favoured method of the American state itself, and even more so its Israeli attack dog. The present Iran war began with assassination strikes on top officials, including Ali Khamenei; in his first term, Trump took out Qassem Soleimani, the legendary Revolutionary Guard commander. Drone strikes against real or imagined Taliban insurgents were a constant feature of the Afghanistan war, especially after Barack Obama came to power; Obama also ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden.
The latter became a big-budget Hollywood film, courtesy of CIA-aligned auteur Kathryn Bigelow. Steven Spielberg made a movie of the Mossad mop-up operation after the Munich massacre. But essentially all mega-budget Hollywood fare today, given its favoured contemporary genre of superhero action, presents brave lone avengers fighting cartoonish evildoers by means of spectacular violence. The language of the repressive state begins to mimic that of the action film hero, and war is presented as a matter of killing the ‘bad guys’.
Yet that comic-book logic predates the comic book, in the form of the classic western, with the lone avenger or benevolent outlaw dispensing rough justice in the lawless west. It is a powerful idea in a society which has only really known specifically bourgeois forms of injustice; not for the Americans the nostalgia for noblesse oblige common in Europe. The world has always been a hard one, systematically rigged in favour of the rich: the Yankee WASP tycoon, the robber baron, and now the globe-spanning empires of centi-billionaires. It has only known individual retribution as a check.
Thus the political heterogeneity of American assassins and spree-killers is no great surprise. There are numerous conflicts on which one can project the same drama: domineering governments versus hard-working ordinary folks (the right); or capitalist oligarchs versus the tyrannised employees (the left). In the age of Trump, the centre has its own version: patriotic Americans against Putin’s morally-contemptible Manchurian candidate. A decade of relentless lawfare and several electoral cycles have failed to dislodge him, and so the time is ripe for the centrist terrorist. (The Epstein saga provides additional colour to all variants.)
Any way out of this spiral of madness must have in mind the fundamental conflict underlying the epiphenomenal ones - between classes in the productive process, especially the capitalists and proletariat, but also significantly including the petty bourgeoisie. The working class is central for us, because its real objective interests - those objectives which, successfully pursued, increase its power in society and material flourishment - are intrinsically pro-social in ways those of the other classes are not. Only collective power can achieve them, and therefore progress towards them is a solvent to the atomisation and bizarre irrationalism increasingly dominating society.
Since we start from such a poor vantage point, however, many more lone avengers of the Cole Allen type may yet be expected.